A Plea to Bring Our Humanity Back into Creativity and Marketing

After this week’s media hype about Anthropic essentially threatening to kill off humanity (thank you, Cal Newport), I am responding with a plea to please bring back our humanity into creativity, marketing, and storytelling.

Add to that list anything else that is being dominated without consent by generative AI.

And with that plea, is my own offering of creative services. Since 2012, I have labeled myself as a one-woman creative agency, and I continue to do human-made work that celebrates the raw, organic, human-lived experience. Everything that I have worked with — from paleo and CrossFit, to outdoor adventure and travel — has been rooted in the human experience.

I want to share a little background first, but if you are a company, small business owner, artist, coach, or marketing lead for a corporation, I would love to connect with you about bringing more human-powered writing, photography, and creative consultation within your business. The most important part of marketing is building a relationship with your customers and possible future clientele. The most authentic ad trusted way to do that is through humans. I don’t care what your budget is — I just want to bring more humanity back into our world.

Send me an email if that is you!

Generative AI as a Litmus Test for Companies and Clientele

When AI began to take hold of the digital world, fellow photographers I know fretted over the future of their jobs. I stood in a place of calm confidence, believing that if a company thought humans were disposable in the creative arena, it was a company that I didn’t want to work with, anyway. Good riddance, I thought.

To me, generative AI became a litmus test.

At the time, my thinking was directed specifically at larger companies and corporations. I wasn’t thinking about the impact of generative AI on the average person, teenagers, and kids. I wasn’t even thinking about small business owners thinking that they could use generative AI as a free replacement for creative labour… which has now resulted in the over-saturation of AI slop the internet is drowning in.

Perhaps most importantly, I wasn’t thinking about what the consequences would be for our entire species when AI became injected into every tool inside of our daily lives: eroding attention spans, deteriorating our ability to think critically, an erasure of skills like writing and research.

I wrote an essay about it over on my Substack, Reclaiming the Wild Woman, which you can dive into here: “Here Is Your Permission to be Angry.“

Not only should this make you angry, this should scare you. We need to find ways to channel fear and anger into actions that change what feels like an inevitably apocalyptic future.

This was sparked by a long chain of events. The digital burnout has been eating at me for a long time (maybe a lifetime), and it has finally peaked. I’ve carried a narrative that I should be able to juggle more things and keep up, but something finally snapped in me, pushing me back over the edge — giving me the permission I’ve been seeking to lean fully into a slower paced life, marinated in a grounded, tangible, 3D human experience.

What led me here? Well, most recently, a few things unfolded.

Last weekend, I went to the Olympic Peninsula to shoot a wedding. On the way back, we stopped at a coffee shop. Now, if you don’t know me and my passion for food, I take my coffee shops (and restaurants) very seriously. I am, admittedly, a sucker for autumn flavours. One of my favourite things about autumn is to be wrapped up in a cozy sweater, sipping a homemade pumpkin spice latte on a roadtrip.

Based on reviews, this is what Solid Coffee could deliver. Both myself and the lead photographer enjoyed a lactose-free PSL paired with a gluten-free loaf of bread, but I was disappointed to walk in and see AI slop covering the walls… for sale. Labeled as “art.” If I wasn’t a passenger on someone else’s timeline, I would have left immediately and taken my business elsewhere.

Because supporting human-made art matters to me. As soon as I see captions, graphics, flyers, or “art” being put out by a business, they lose all credibility to me. And, any present and future business.

Within the week, I had a similar experience within my online coaching community space at Unbeatable Mind. I’ve been exploring where to live next, with my eyes set curiously on North Idaho or NW Montana, and posted in the group if anyone had any connections there. I am after my high performer community, after all, so my life coaching program is a good place to start.

Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful for people connecting me with other people and events. But someone shared a flyer for an event being hosted by a coach somewhere in Montana, and you could see from five miles away that everything about it was made from generative AI. Everything looked fake. There was zero soul in it.

I jokingly said, “Looks like they need me to make flyers for them instead of AI!” The coach who made it responded to let him know if I can help generate flyers and other materials.

Ahhhh, and this is just another sign that we are losing our humanity. Humans don’t generate. Artists don’t generate. GENERATE is what robots do.

We humans? We create.

I’ve been trying to connect the dots between who I see using AI without shame, without care, or without awareness that other people can smell it from miles away. What do these people and businesses and organizations have in common? I’ve been shocked and disappointed that I’ve seen so many life coaches living in the high performance world turn to AI. Their newsletters and graphics reek of it. But then again, why am I surprised? These are the same people who are obsessed with biohacking and life hacks. They are the ones who are buying nervous system stimulators and gravity boots. They are trying to take the pain out of their human experience — thereby removing an essential ingredient to what it feels like to be human.

I say this as a warning to anyone who is using generative AI in their marketing, because I am not the only one who is feeling this way.

It’s true, not everyone is tuned in to notice. And not everyone cares. There are plenty of generative-AI-sympathizers out there. There are those who, for some reason, have joined the quest for the almighty tech wanna-be-god.

But the people who matter can spot AI a mile away, and will take their business to places that are created by humans, for humans. These are the people who are paying attention. They are the people who are staying engaged with the world, instead of numbing out. These are the people for whom attention is a revolution.

And right now, paying attention just might be one of the most revolutionary things that you can do.

You know what’s great about that? It doesn’t cost you anything, and it comes from how you choose to BE. Yes, we need to DO, but first you have to wake the f*%$ up.

This is where I’m coming in. Swooping in with a desperate plea to save our humanity, and my own offering of services to do just that.

I’m going to re-iterate some of the above, just to emphasize my desperation — and share my original post below, which I shared in my online coaching community.

An Official Invitation to Bring Our Humanity Back into Creativity and Marketing

If you are a small business owner or coach or creative who is depending on generative AI to build your branding, I would love to connect with you about bringing the human soul back into your business and marketing.

This is no judgment from me, but with the recent articles by Cal Newport, I believe that as creatives we need to stop burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the apocalyptic world we are co-creating, and speak up.

As a full-time creative… for the last year and a half, as popularity of generative AI has picked up, I’ve been spending my time becoming increasingly frustrated with the way the world is going. Generative AI has been built on plagiarism and has cost so many creative jobs. Money is funneling into tech, while art remains underfunded.

I believe in a world where that flip-flops, and I want to be part of that solution.

If you are a business owner who is using AI to create newsletters, websites, graphics instead of photography, copy, captions, marketing consultation and brainstorming, etc. I would love to talk with you about how I can being some human soul back into your business.

Because success is built on relationships, and the relationships start the first time your future customer comes into contact with you: whether that is through a newsletter or an instagram post.

As a creative, I continue to see photographers use AI to write captions, writers use AI to generate images, and global corporations replace human-led marketing teams with AI. I have been confused as to how this continues to be the case, when it seems to obvious that these things are not human-made.

I’ve wondered — do people not care? Do they not notice?

But for myself, I am burnt out from reading the same slop. As soon as I see a business using AI, they lose all credibility to me. I am interested in supporting and connecting with humans who are human’ing, and I know that others feel the same.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a new doctor and her email to me was written entirely by AI. I felt disappointed, and I barely absorbed what she wrote, because it sounded exactly like all the other garbage that is online right now. There is no connection, no soul in it. And that’s coming from someone who is supposed to have your health in their hands.

But it made me think: Did she use AI, or are non-writers now being trained by AI to write in this style?

Is AI now the one in charge, and the mass majority of human brains have already been trained/altered by how they think and write and output information?

I don’t want to live in that world. I want to live in a world created by humans.

So if this is somewhere you have found yourself, I would love to chat. No judgment. I got pulled into the excitement for a couple of weeks, and used it as if it were another team member. It felt exciting and empowering to think that I could do everything myself, without outsourcing a consultant. But I noticed that it started to change how I thought, how I wrote… and after using it, I felt something sour within my soul. So I have been there, and I understand the appeal.

And, having been there, I want to be part of the soul-ution back to our humanity.

If you are craving some more humanity, or want to build a business that will outlive the current trends of slop… please reach out if you’d like to have a call and we can brainstorm (and heartstorm) a better future together.

If you’re enjoying this monologue, I’d love to hear your thoughts, experiences, and how you are bringing your humanity back into your daily life.

And if you want some more inspiration about this, I’d love to invite you to read my essay over on my Substack: “Here’s Your Permission Slip to Be Angry.“

And, lastly… this isn’t just about business owners and artists. This is about everyone.

I’d love to create a community where I invite you into my little bubble of reality, where we can meet monthly (maybe more?) online to build a better world together. If that sounds of interest, please reach out!

Bringing Our Humanity Back into Creativity and Marketing

Generative AI as a Litmus Test for Companies and Clientele

I wrote an essay about it over on my Substack, Reclaiming the Wild Woman, which you can dive into here: “Here Is Your Permission to be Angry.“

We humans? We create.

I say this as a warning to anyone who is using generative AI in their marketing, because I am not the only one who is feeling this way.

And right now, paying attention just might be one of the most revolutionary things that you can do.

An Official Invitation to Bring Our Humanity Back into Creativity and Marketing

I don’t want to live in that world. I want to live in a world created by humans.

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Bringing Our Humanity Back into Creativity and Marketing

Generative AI as a Litmus Test for Companies and Clientele

I wrote an essay about it over on my Substack, Reclaiming the Wild Woman, which you can dive into here: “Here Is Your Permission to be Angry.“

We humans? We create.

I say this as a warning to anyone who is using generative AI in their marketing, because I am not the only one who is feeling this way.

And right now, paying attention just might be one of the most revolutionary things that you can do.

An Official Invitation to Bring Our Humanity Back into Creativity and Marketing

I don’t want to live in that world. I want to live in a world created by humans.

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